Why clean coal isnt

Environmentalists say liquid coal can turn a Prius into a Hummer

Coal used to fuel power plants and other industrial
activity is a key culprit in pollution and climate change. So what is
“clean coal”? The term “clean coal” describes various
processes that remove pollutants from coal, our cheapest, most abundant,
and dirtiest energy source. By reducing coal’s environmental
footprint through technological wizardry, the coal-mining industry and the
Bush administration hope to keep coal, which currently produces more than
half of all U.S. electricity, a big part of our energy picture for many
years to come. Clean coal proponents also want to liquefy coal to
turn it into a form of automotive fuel that, according to the
industry-sponsored Coal-to-Liquids Coalition, costs less and burns cleaner
in some ways than the traditional diesel fuel it could replace. Several
members of Congress from coal states are keen on having the government
subsidize the production of so-called liquid coal — which can be used
anywhere diesel fuel currently goes — as a “homegrown”
alternative to foreign oil. Industry analysts say there is enough coal in
America to last hundreds of years, saving us untold expense and trouble
obtaining regular petroleum from unfriendly foreign governments.But major environmental groups, from the Sierra Club
to the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that clean coal is anything
but. The process involves heating coal to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and
mixing it with water to produce a gas, then converting the gas into diesel
fuel. Although the Coal-to-Liquids Coalition says that carbon dioxide
emissions from the entire production cycle of liquid coal are “equal
to, or slightly below, those of conventional petroleum-derived
fuels,” its claims are based on a single federal study, now six years
old, that environmental leaders disagree with profoundly. Jim Presswood, federal energy advocate for the
Natural Resources Defense Council says, “Liquid CO2 emissions are twice as
much as emissions from conventional petroleum-derived fuels.” He says
that even if CO2 emissions were captured as part of the process, at best
liquid coal would be 12 percent worse than the gasoline equivalent. As some
environmentalists have put it, liquid coal can turn any hybrid Prius into a
Hummer. The Washington Post editorialized,
“To wean the U.S. off of just one million barrels of the 21 million
barrels of crude oil consumed daily, an estimated 120 million tons of coal
would need to be mined each year. The process requires vast amounts of
water, particularly a concern in the parched West. And the price of a plant
is estimated at $4 billion.” Also, in recent years, particularly in
Appalachia, mining companies have gone from simple excavation to blasting
off the tops of mountains in an ecologically devastating process known as
mountaintop removal. For their part, greens acknowledge the importance of
cleaning up coal and other dirty energy sources but would rather see more
funding devoted to researching, developing, and implementing alternative
and renewable energy sources that don’t come with so much
environmental baggage. For more information:
Coal-to-Liquids Coalition, www.futurecoalfuels.org; the Sierra Club’s
“Stopping the Coal Rush,”
www.sierraclub.org/environmentallaw/coal.Send questions to Earth Talk, care of E/The Environmental Magazine,
P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881 or e-mail earthtalk@emagazine.com.